Editing Encyclopedia:Historical archive/Policy/Approval mechanism (section)

===PeterK's Proposal: Scoring===
This idea has some of the same principles as the Automated Heuristic suggested above. I agree that an automated method for determining "good" articles for offline readers is absolutely crucial. I have a different idea on how to go about it.
I think the principles of easy editing and how wikipedia works now is what makes it great. I think we need to take those principles along with some search engine ideas to give a confidence level for documents. So people extracting the data for offline purposes can decide the confidence level they want and only extract articles that meet that confidence level.

I think the exact equation for the final scoring needs to be discussed. I don't think I could come up with a final version by myself, but I'll give an example of what would give good point and bad points.

Final Score:
a: first thing we need it a quality/scoring value for editors. Anonymous editors would be given a value of 1 and a logged in user may get 1 point added to their value for each article he/she edits, up to a value of 100.
b: 0.25 points for each time a user reads the article
c: 0.25 point for each day the article has existed in wikipedia
d: each time the article is edited it gets 1+(a/10)*2 points, anonymous user would give it 1.2 and a fully qualified user would give it 20 points.
e: next if an anonymous user makes a large change then you get a -20 point deduction. Even though this is harsh, if it goes untouched for 80 days it will gain all those points back. It will gain the points back faster if a lot of people have read the article.

This is the best I can think of right now, if I come up with a better scoring system I'll make some changes. Anyone feel free to test score a couple of articles to see how this algorithm holds up. We can even get a way of turning the score to a percentage, so that people can extract 90% qualified articles.

''next if an anonymous user makes a large change then you get a -20 point deduction.''

This one is very dangerous. What is the threshold for a "large" change? If we set it too high, this won't work very well (it will presumedly react to blanking a page, but I think this is most often used as a substitute for the "nominate for deletion" link that should be there). If we set it too low, and several edits are made by anonymous users to a not-very-popular article, then it could give a low (negative?) score, even though the article is of a high quality. [[User:Brianjd|Brian]][[User talk:Brianjd|j]][[Special:Contributions/Brianjd|d]] 10:22, 2005 Jan 29 (UTC)

''Anyone feel free to test score a couple of articles to see how this algorithm holds up.''

How? We don't know the scores for the editors. The only way to test this algorithm properly is to download some articles and the entire contributions lists of all the contributors! [[User:Brianjd|Brian]][[User talk:Brianjd|j]][[Special:Contributions/Brianjd|d]] 10:22, 2005 Jan 29 (UTC)